Gaming for ants?

It seems portable gaming PCs are all the rage these days. There’s the venerable Steam Deck, the ASUS Rog Ally, and now the Lenovo Legion Go. All of them builds upon the success of the Nintendo Switch: gaming on the go. Just so long you have a battery bank with you as well. These devices don’t last very long on a single charge.

Obviously, any consumer electronics company with a gaming focus would want to emulate (read: blatantly copy) Nintendo Switch’s success. As of writing it is the third best-selling gaming console of all time, behind only the Nintendo DS (another portable gaming device), and the legendary PlayStation 2. The aim for these companies is to do for the PC-gaming market what the Switch did for console games. The market for people wanting to game on the go - or lying in bed - is massive, apparently.

I personally do not understand the appeal. I want to consume media on as big a screen as possible. Ever since I bought a 65-inch OLED television, I don’t even like watching Youtube videos on my 32-inch Pro Display XDR monitor (not at all humble brag), much less on my Mac laptop screen. I almost never watch video on my iPhone because of how relatively tiny the screen is (I only watch TikTok videos my friends send me). Game-makers and video-makers spend so much time and effort on making a quality visual product, only for people to view them on a tiny phone-sized screen? Kind of sad, actually.

That is why I am not going to spend the $700 or so on one of these portable PC game devices. Its portable-ness means absolutely nothing to me. On a long flight, I’m either reading a book, or listening to podcasts. 15-hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong is not the time to play Baldur's Gate 3. Especially in a cramped economy seat.

To each their own, of course. I’ve a friend playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on remote play to his smartphone. I will be doing so on my 65-inch TV.

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Play time.

The rise of racing games

With the coronavirus going on all around us, there’s obviously no professional sports happening at the moment. The main source of entertainment and escape for plenty of people, it’s rather cruel that there aren’t any sports to watch during this banishment to the confines of our homes. I get it: the reason we have to shelter in place is the same reason there aren’t any major league baseball games happening right now. It doesn’t diminish how much I am missing sports, and surely I’m one amongst many.

One discipline that seems to have embraced the situation quite well is that of motorsports. It’s uniquely able to adapt to the world of gaming, the simulation of which offers a convincing translation that it suffices to keep us entertained. Unlike a basketball video game where you don’t physically toss around a ball to play, a car in a racing game can be controlled with a wheel and pedal set-up, offering a decent enough facsimile that pro racers actually use them for training. The more extravagant setups can even offer some modicum of motion and g-force simulation, though those are prohibitively expensive for mere mortals like me who don’t have million-dollar contracts.

But I have been playing racing games with a wheel and pedal (shoutout to Logitech) since the days of Gran Turismo 4 in the early 2000s, and it’s deeply satisfying for me to see how much the “real-life” motorsport community have embraced driving simulators like a Gran Turismo or iRacing during this coronavirus episode. There’s still lots of racing happening on the weekends, just all in the virtual world. Honestly I’m quite thankful for it because it helps to break up the utter monotony of every day being exactly the same as the last.

Of course, I’m eager for real racing to return to real race tracks. There’s no replicating the sights and sounds of drivers man-handling actual cars through a corner, displaying acts of athleticism most of us can barely imagine. I’d also like to go outside and attend races, and indeed there’s no more intoxicating smell than the burning of petrol (sorry, Formula E).

In the meantime, I’m glad we have a pretty good substitute.

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This is nuts!

It's all in the tires

This past weekend I did the usual driving on my makeshift simulator playing GT Sport. My absolute favorite thing to do - and just about the only thing I do these days - is drive the Porsche 911 GT3RS on the Nurburgring Nordschleife. Cumulatively since early Summer I must’ve driven around 200 laps on the 13+ mile circuit, which is a number I aim to get into the thousands.

For whatever reason, probably a mix of boredom and curiosity, I had the urge to sample another popular racing game: Assetto Corsa. The game also features the Nordschleife and the same model year GT3RS so I thought it’d be a bit of intrigue to compare the two titles. A hefty 25GB download and $40 dollars damage to the wallet later, for the first time ever I was driving a different game that isn't Gran Turismo. 

I really should’ve switched sooner. Assetto Corsa is absolutely fantastic. Graphically it cannot hold a candle to GT (zero attempt at photo-realism here) but on driving dynamics it’s a league above. For the longest time I’ve read about how the likes of GT and Forza are more on the arcade side than pure simulation, and that has been utterly confirmed within one lap of the Nordschleife in AC.

It’s completely down to the tires. GT’s physic engine is quite excellent in replicating responses and reflexes of a real car, and in that area it isn’t far behind Assetto Corsa. What AC revealed to me that was utterly lacking in GT is proper tire simulation. Tires in GT are standardized arbitrary values with no basis of correlation to anything realistic. High horsepower road cars in GT Sport are practically un-drivable even with traction control turned on unless racing slicks are put on. 

A Ferrari LaFerrari in GT Sport will roast its stock tires through the first four gears - highly unrealistic. Even the aforementioned GT3RS is unusable in first gear because it cannot find traction - unless I put on slick tires. 

Assetto Corsa has shown me the light: proper tire model is the foundation of a good driving simulator. AC replicates the actual tires of what a particular car came with from the factory. Select a Toyota Trueno Sprinter AE86 in the game and in the setup menu it’ll show it’s fitted with ‘Street 90s’ tires. A GT3RS on the other hand is shod with bespoke ‘Hypercar road’ rubber. Good tire modeling provides a tremendous amount of road feel and information transmitted through the steering wheel. Instead of relying on muscle memory I can now better react to the minute details of what the car is telling me. 

Playing Assetto Corsa has been a revelation. I don’t think I can go back to GT Sport, as incredibly beautiful and pretty to look at it may be (I’m going to miss the sunset flares and orange glow on the Nordschleife). AC is great if you’re like me and just want to get in a car and go: all tracks and cars are available right from the beginning. 

Cheers to many more miles to come. 

It may be a GT logo on there but it's all Assetto Corsa from now on. 

The first Gran Turismo game I won't buy

I've owned and played all previous 6 iterations of Gran Turismo, and I'm sorry to say I will not be purchasing the newly released Gran Turismo Sport anytime soon. After reading the reviews, I can't justify spending the proper $60 for a game with so little content and such draconian requirements in order to play. 

The core attraction of Gran Turismo for me is the sheer number of cars spanning all eras and the numerous tracks I can drive those cars on. I can still remember the seminal moment it was to drive the full Nurburgring Nordschleife in GT4. The car and track count in GT:S is, without mincing words, utterly atrocious. Discounting all the variations, there's only about 90 unique cars in the game, a system shock to those us used to 600+ car libraries. GT:S only has six real-world tracks, which is bizarrely embarrassing especially when the main focus of the game is e-sport online racing utilizing the FIA license.

How did Polyphony manage to partner with the FIA yet only produce six real-world locations? Where's Silverstone? Where's La Sarthe? Spa? 

The online racing component also brings with it an enormous negative externality: GT:S requires a constant Internet connection in order to play most parts of the game. I did not think ill of this until I found out that even non-racing portions of the game such as the amazingly beautiful photo-mode is locked behind the online authentication wall. If Polyphony ever decides to turn off its game servers (as it has for GT5), GT:S as constituted today would be no more than a drink coaster. 

GT:S would need to the following updates before I part with my money: massively increase the amount of cars and tracks, add more single-player campaign events/races, bring back dynamic time/weather (how they have regressed on this from GT6 is baffling), and get rid of the online connection requirement for parts of the game that obviously don't need it.